FedExCup playoffs a missing link for Koepka
PARAMUS, N.J. — The majors are done for the year. Brooks Koepka is not.
Koepka is one week removed from winning the PGA Championship which, to go along with his second straight U.S. Open title, gives him a sensational season by anyone’s standards. Tiger Woods called Koepka a lock to win PGA Tour player of the year.
Koepka doesn’t believe that’s the case. And a look at his FedEx Cup playoff record is all the motivation he needs.
In three years of being eligible for the PGA Tour’s post-season, Koepka has one top-10 finish. He has started inside the top 20 each of the last three years and has yet to improve his standing when the four playoff events were over. One year, he didn’t make it beyond the third playoff event.
“Sitting back and reflecting on it, how cool is it to be player of the year? It would be such an honour,” Koepka said Wednesday. “But I need to finish it off. I want to come out in the playoffs and actually perform, and hopefully, leave it where there is no option.”
It starts Thursday at The Northern Trust on a course that might remind him of Bellerive, where Koepka set the PGA Championship scoring record at 264.
Ridgewood Country Club is plenty long at 7,385 yards for a par 71. The rough is thicker than usual because of recent rain, which also means the course is extremely soft. Dustin Johnson, the world’s No. 1 player and the top seed in the FedEx Cup, rarely hit a shot from the fairway without splotches of mud on his golf ball.
The FedEx Cup playoffs begin with the top 125 on the PGA Tour, meaning all of them have shown some degree of form to get here.
With the points worth quadruple
value, the top 100 after this week advance to the second stage at the TPC Boston next week, with the top 70 reaching the BMW Championship at Aronimink and the top 30 going to the Tour Championship at East Lake.
A lot has gone right for Koepka in a year that began so wrong.
The pain he felt in his left wrist in early December never went away over the holidays, and after finishing 37 shots behind Dustin Johnson at Kapalua, he was out for four months. He spent some two months in a soft cast to let the partially torn tendon heal, and wound up missing the Masters.
In his third start, he was runner-up at Colonial. Three weeks later at Shinnecock Hills, he became the first player in 29 years to win back-to-back in the U.S. Open. Two months later, he became the first player since Tiger Woods in 2000 to win the U.S. Open and PGA Championship in the same year.
Koepka has a chance to reach No. 1 in the world this week, though he is thinking more about the next four events and the US$10-million bonus that goes to the FedEx Cup champion.
“I just haven’t shown up,” he said.